Dark Matter Dimensions Teaser Trailer

The weekend of Termina

So, it looks like everyone has died out since our last post on saturday. Well, we did, on monday.

Here's what our weekend consisted of:

DAWN OF THE FIRST DAY:

10:00-13:30 choochoo

13:30-14:00 arrival at Mathijs (yes I missed my train dammit)

15:30 arrival of Brian at Mathijs (ha)

13:30-18:30 Programming!

18:30-19:30 gorge ourselves with Mathijs' mom's amazing cooking

NIGHT OF THE FIRST DAY:

19:30-10:00 Programming 'til late up evening

10:00-11:30 Mathijs' and Philippe rubber duckying, us programming

11:30-11:45 Philippe leaves us ;-;

11:45-2:00 More programming! Such fun. 

2:00-2:45 lame jokes

2:45-3:00 invention of the terms "unity" and "monodevelop"

3:00-9:00 sleep

DAWN OF THE SECOND DAY:

9:00-9:30 wake up and breakfast. Not everyone was as fond with six hours of sleep. Needless to say, the others found a solution. 

**Reenactment**

9:30-12:30 you guessed it, programming

12:30-13:00 omnomnomnomnom

13:00-19:00 oh so much programming, and where the f*ck are these bugs coming from?

19:00-20:00 FRIETENKROKETEBFRIKANDELLEKKERRR(en kaassoufflé)

NIGHT OF THE SECOND DAY:

20:00-22:30 Programming. 

22:30-22:45 Reunion with Philippe!

22:45-23:30 aaaaand back to programming

23:30-0:45 yea no we're still programming

0:45-2:30 still programming...

2:30-7:30 sleep? Haha! Programming. 

DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY:

7:30-9:00 woohoo programming

9:00-9:30 shouldn't we have breakfast or shit?

9:30-11:30 our souls had left our body already anyway, programming. 

11:30-11:35 shit guys are we going to finish this?

11:35-11:40 discussion if we'll finish before the deadline of 14:00

11:40-11:45 conclusion we won't finish before the deadline of 14:00

11:45-11:50 panic attacks

11:50-12:30 fuck guys. Focus. Program. 

12:35-12:40 wow, wtf happened the last five minutes?

12:40-12:45 you hungry? No. Okay. 

12:45-13:15 panic programming

13:15-13:30 miraculously end up with a near complete final result

13:30-13:40 compile into a build, finishing the flyer and trailer and everything

13:40-13:45 uploading

13:45-13:46 ETA: 1 hr 27m

13:46-13:50 panic

13:50-13:52 contact tutor about bad internet

13:52-13:55 no response. Panic. 

13:55-14:00 become very religious all of a sudden

14:00-sometimeafter:00 discover that everything had uploaded eventually and that it wouldn't be a problem

15:00-15:05 I'm hungry

15:05-15:10 eat

15:10-15:15 I'm not hungry anymore. 

15:15-15:30 our goodbyes and thankyous

15:30-17:30 our trips home

17:30-18:00 shower, have a bagel, etc

NIGHT OF THE FINAL DAY

18:00-8:00 man fuck that moon and the end of the world shit I'm going to bed night fuckers suck a dick

...

Dawn of a new day:

We awoke, well rested. We showered, and put on clean underwear (omfg finally). We had breakfast, we were proud of our accomplishment.

And then Logica came and whipped its dick in our face. 

Nevertheless, we are all very proud of what we have created, and aside from the hard work this weekend, had a lot of fun.

And yes, you're curious, so here's a link to the trailer:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UOiy4AbPQbY

We'll see you friday at the symposium,

The heroes who saved DMD,

Bulletproof Games

To sleep... or not to sleep... that is the question

aft'r about thirteen hours of programming we decid'd we to goeth to b'd. yea moo programming is ahead of us tom'rrow. . . and tom'rrow night. our progresseth? well we hast ev'rything w'rking basicly. . . on diff'rent projects on diff'rent comput'rs. anon it's timeth f'r the tedious progresseth of putting ev'rything togeth'r. . .

Now... we have...
More weapons...
Turrets...
Better asteroids...
Integrated music...
More ships...
and even more terrifying black holes.....

Onward, to the next day...
Oh, and by the way, we have a name:

Dark Matter Dimensions



The BulletProof Team

Black holes and revelations...

So, the upgrading mechanics are done. Yes, they are. Now I've got to implement them. Right.

Besides that, I finished the theme song! Yes I did! And it is epic. I've also made a menu backing track right away, so the dramatic entrance of music is even more dramatic in battle (spoilers!).
I also build a randomize-script for the textures and colours of the asteroids, they no longer all look exactly the same! And I may or may not have added an extra texture...
Now I'm working on the black hole, giving it sounds and camera effects, so it's even more terrifying (because it wasn't at all at first, really). The smart player wins before the time runs out.
After all of that, I'll go and implement the upgrades (yes, fiiinneee, I'll do it...), but so far it's looking good.

Oh yeah! We came up with a name for our game!
It's called: Battle for Tier 8

...or no wait, Best Upgrade Tier War Z Space Battle Eclipse Apocalypse EclipZalypZe fuckit...


Emile

More eyecandy, fire the rockets!

I can imagine you're all dying to see the game, and we can't wait to show it to the world, so here is a screenshot. In this screenshot you can see a base. The base is currently using a placeholder graphic (the same model as for the ship, but 30 times larger). We've also added some lock-on missiles. These missiles will search for an enemy in sight and lock on to that target. And those explosions are new too, pretty neat huh?
-Philippe

With the deadline coming closer and closer, more and more late night programming session are due. And I have to say, I love it!
-Philippe

PS No we aren't sponsored by Heineken, unfortunately.

And let there be ligh... erm... A SONG!

So, I was in charge of the sounds and music. For the sounds it wasn't such a challenge. I used Star Wars and Halo sound effects for the weapons, and made my own spaceship sound by filtering and mixing jet turbines, fans, and other industrial motor sounds. The results are lovely. I haven't done much in the vacation, so now it's up to me to get back on track. I did try out some tunes for the background music though, although nothing really sounded like I wanted it too. Mathijs is convinced that a heavy metal backing track would do the trick, but I beg to differ. Some metal influences and guitars growling would fit better in my opinion. It took me a while to come up with something good, because I started from the influences (what Mathijs wanted), instead of from a strong core. So I looked up some soundtracks of other space/sci-fi games, like Mass Effect, Halo, Galaga, and even Space Invaders (even though Galaga is just 8-bit music and Space Invaders is just 4 notes), and eventually I got a tune. I've been working on it for a while now. So far it's a spacy, ominous intro, which will then go into some heavier stuff, with shimmering strings, ethereal voices and, of course, a crunching guitar, which I'll leave for Mathijs. There's a demo of the song attached to this blog. Check it out, because this is going to be an amazing theme.

-Emile

Website is now online!

The website is still under construction, but now good enough to be seen. Please register, we will send you an email when the demo is out and when you can get the final version! On the website you can also view our media gallery, wich will be updated. Also you can like us on facebook, so click the like button. Our website: www.bulletproofgames.nl.

The last weeks we also have been working hard on the game and it's comming together. The menu is almost finished as you could read on last post from Mathijs, also we have a smooth movement now and the online synchronisation is almost done too. But although we have made a lot of progress we are not that pleased with our game, we think it's not fun enough yet. That's also the reason we have been postponing our demo.

So like us on facebook, check out our site and register!

Martijn ~ BulletProof Games

More Eye Candy

It's time for more eye candy! I've been working on the main menu system for the past couple of days and I'd like to show you what I have so far.

I've created a dynamic menu with a star and a planet on the background. When you compare the two screenshots, you'll notice that the planet and the star have moved. This is because they behave like they would ingame. When you click our BulletProof Games logo in the bottom right corner of the screen, you'll automaticly be taken to our website. I've also created a credit sequence for when the game is done. It resembles the infamous Star Wars Crawl and has some star wars music, though spiced up with brutality, in the background. Only a couple of tweaks left to do, I might even add a facebook button :)

Mathijs ~ BulletProof Games

We hope you had a nice Christmas!

Our meeting last week was much fun, but also productive. We discussed some things and I worked on connecting our game to the database. The others made a lot of progress and soon we will release the blogpost on the demo that should have been released. We weren't pleased with how everything worked at the time so we will work hard and soon there will be a better demo that we will show you guys. 

Also I have worked on a website, it's still under construction. When most of the bugs are solved we will post the link on our blog and we will also have a facebook page by then!

Martijn ~ BulletProof Games

Experimenting with variables

1000 Planets, with 1000 astroids.

GameArt Update

I have been working mostly on the game art in the past few weeks. I started by deciding the art style we where going for. This really depended on the fact if we wanted to make everything ourselves or not.

I started by using my own made model of a space ship. I made this model in Maya.

I realized that making all the models and textures would take too much time. That’s why I started to search for model under the license of Creative Commons. I found a lot of really good models on tf3dm.com, for instance, the space ship models of tf3dm.com/user/herminio. I then tried to implement one of his spaceship models, but this turned out to be more work than expected, because the models had lots of problems in a game engine due to wrong backface culling. I fixed this by editing the model in Maya and manually reversing the normal. I also separated the weapons from the model so they can be controlled separately. Here's a picture of the space ship I am talking about:

A lot of the other models for the spaceships we want to use are of the same artist, so most likely I have to spend a lot of time on them to be able to use them, as I expect most of them will have the same backface issue, but in my opinion these are the best free models I could find. They look absolutely great and fit together too, and it takes up much less time than making everything ourselves. Next I looked up some asteroids and made a Unity package of them, this went quite easy.

I also worked on the logo of our company BulletProof games. This logo is now visible on top of the page. The font I used is Airstrike by Iconian Fonts - Daniel Zadorozny, and is free to use for anyone.

Brian van Nunen ~ BulletProof Games

My update

Hey!

Here my update on our progress of our game. I think we are doing a really good job, not only on making the game, but on the team building as well. We're really becoming a good team. Last Monday we celebrated Sinterklaas (with some other Game Technology students), it was really fun and it was nice to chill with each other without having to think about the game. Last Wednesday we had our first beer WITH pizza while we were working on the game, although I had a little bit slow start because I left my laptop at a friend’s house. Now I’m working on making a game world with some asteroids. The fun thing is, while we're working on the project if we see or think something we can directly think of something awesome we can do with it, because our team is really enthusiastic about the project. For example, I wrote a piece of code that puts a gameobject at a random position at a circle. To test it a put 100 cubes in a circle. It created something really nice, which looked like an asteroid ring around a planet (like Saturn has). So now we can use that piece of test code to make similar structures in our game! Anyways back to work, talk to you later!

Philippe ~BulletProof Games

First Impressions

It's an honour to publish a first impression of our game! :D I've created this scene yesterday to test the effects of Unity on the game environment we're creating and to provide ourselves with a base which we can use to develop the awesome features we have in mind. In the scene we can see a planet, two asteroids, a star and our spaceship. The light of the star also casts shadows over the object in this system and creates a flare in the player's camera. I've found the texture of the planet on a site which has a lot more planet textures to offer freely, we'll be sure to use that site to its full extent to create some diversity. The spaceship and the asteroid were delivered by Brian, who has been spending his time searching the web for some awesome models. In this particular scene you can move the ship around, it doesn't move very naturally, but we have improved it a lot already. In the actual game we will create a couple of random planets, possibly with asteroid belts and/or atmospheres. We do this to give players the feeling they're flying in an actual solar system. Philippe has made some progress with the asteroids, which will spawn outside the playable area and slowly float through it. Hitting an asteroid with your spaceship can have desolating consequences! After finishing the planets I'll see if I can add some shooting to the spaceship and I'll start making the game playable online.

Mathijs ~ BulletProof Games

Team Meeting December 4th

Last wednesday our team came together to work on the game,

the meeting was at Emile's place, which at first was small and clean, but afterwards was still small but not so clean...

Our setup

The host!

When everyone had finally arrived and settled (because certain people are always late, and Emile had just woken up), we started programming and modelling. Emile began on the movement script, which is used to move your spaceship trough space, and this movement has to feel perfect. Philippe watched some tutorials to learn how to use unity to it's full extent. Mathijs and I, Martijn, oriented on some different ways to implement an online multiplayer interface in our game. Brian fixed a pretty nice model, and looked up some other models to use. But because you can't work on an empty stomach, we got pizza and beer (of course) to refill our tanks and work even better. 

We're planning on completing our demo at the end of next week. There will be a blogpost about the demo around that time!

Martijn ~ BulletProof Games

Brian working on our spaceship

Teambuilding.

Our first post, yay!

Hello,

Welcome to our blog. We, BulletProof Games, are very excited about this project and can't wait to start programming. We are going to base our game on the game Spacewar, which was released in 1962. Spacewar is one of the first games, made by Steve Russell.  It is a two-player game, where each player controls a spaceship and attempts to destroy the other. A black hole in the center of the screen pulls both ships towards it, making it harder to move and to avoid falling into it. In an emergency, a player can enter hyperspace to warp to a random location on the screen, but with a risk of exploding if it's used too often. Our game will be in 3D, with much better graphics than the original game. We are also going to add some of our own ideas and make it a multiplayer game. The game will be more thrilling and will have much better gameplay and more playtime. You will be able to upgrade your ship in various ways as well and be able to fight in spectacular space battles!

On our blog you can follow our progress and take a look behind the scenes (which involves lots of pizza and beer), so follow us, because we'll be back with more info soon!

~BulletProof Games